State Health Care Premium Reduction Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. KENNEDY. Madam Speaker, yesterday afternoon I spent a few moments on the porch of a woman named Therese in Lowell, Massachusetts. Through an oxygen tube and a mask, and surrounded by four generations of her family, she told me the challenges of living with COPD, even though she never smoked a cigarette.

Her mother and her brother both passed away in that home. She was adamant that she would, too. She was hoping to make it for just a few more months, but that survival, Madam Speaker, was contingent on having access to healthcare. Access that our President, in court just this last week, was still trying to take away.

Madam Speaker, how is our country made stronger by taking away Therese's healthcare? What kind of person, let alone administration, looks to the wreckage of nearly over 120,000 lives lost, 2\1/2\ million infected by a pandemic, and decides that the best response is to take away healthcare from millions more?

What is great about an administration that idly watches 40 million Americans lose their jobs, and then tries to take away their healthcare, too? How morally bankrupt that we can lavish praise on essential workers, and then thank them by trying to strip away their access to medicine? All so that the rich can become richer, the powerful more powerful, backed up by a massive tax cut and aggregation of corporate power.

Madam Speaker, this moment has proved, like many other moments of truth in our Nation, that our fates are linked. That our future is shared and uncertain. We have a choice to advance together or to scramble for our own. Four generations of Therese's family know the answer. We know that answer. Today is our chance to prove it.

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